I have papers to write, so I'm going to try to keep this short. But there's something I have to work through first:

The second online journal I read with any regularity was oZ Diary, by Ophelia Z, AKA Kat. Before calling it quits in late November 1997, she was highly active in the nascent journalling community, particularly as the founder of Open Pages.

While she was still writing oZ Diary, I sent her e-mail on four occasions; three times to correct broken links, and once to thank her for letting me read about her life, after she posted her last entry. (I keep copies of all my sent mail.) She replied on all but one of those occasions, and she generally seemed to be a nice person. In fact, I had planned on voting for her journal in the "Hall of Fame" category of Diarist.Net's awards, as she was a pioneer in this community.

It turns out that she was also a fraud.

Is that last sentence too harsh? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Let me back up a bit.

'Twould seem that, over on Diary-L, somebody "outed" Ryan Ozawa -- who now has his own journal, and runs Diarist.Net -- as the creator of Kat/Ophelia, and the writer of oZ Diary. Ryan granted that this was the case, providing this link to an explanation he wrote last year, when he thought his cover was about to be blown.

The reaction on Diary-L has been rather surprisingly positive. "Rather surprisingly" at least in part because, ordinarily, everything on Diary-L causes a flamewar. :-) But I find that I can't quite go along with that sentiment. And I've been trying to figure out why that is.

I've been turning it over in my mind for the past few hours, and I think there are some very significant differences here. No journal tells the "whole truth"; by nature, these things are subjective, not objective. As I write these entries, I'm aware of how much I'm leaving out. Some of the stuff gets left out simply because I have nowhere near enough time and space to write about everything, while some omissions are intentional, as there are aspects to my life I'm not especially interested in sharing.

(For that matter, some stuff gets left out because they involve other people, and I generally try to bend over backwards to avoid violating the privacy of others. You're being spared several subplots as a result.)

Anyway. I leave stuff out. I also take some liberties with minor details, but no more so than any other storyteller. But everything that does make it onto this site is subjectively true.

The same held true -- and holds true -- for Alewife Bayou. It didn't really become a journal until more recently; the early entries consisted of Columbine's observations on various subjects, and didn't involve any deception. Her viewpoint was her viewpoint, and would have been the same no matter what name (or gender) it was presented under.

Furthermore, all of us are complex people, with various aspects of ourselves that interact with different people, at different times. Columbine is an aspect of the person in front of her keyboard, and no less real than the part of myself who talks to you guys. Okay, she's using a pseudonym, but that's hardly an actionable offense.

Granting Ryan a lot of leeway, and supposing that at least part of it did consist of his own experiences, far too much of it still had to have been made up out of whole cloth. Consider that Derek -- Kat's boyfriend -- showed up in the first few entries, and that their evolving relationship was a major plot line through the diary. As far as I can tell from Ryan's explanation, Derek was wholly fictional.

Furthermore, Ryan's explanation suggests that Ophelia was created not to better express a particular side of himself, but rather as "a serious but simple sociological experiment," to see how people react to women online, as opposed to men. That doesn't put him on a very strong moral footing.

That Ophelia was also the founder (and first member) of OpenPages, a webring with only one content-based rule, which is that membership is limited to real journals -- not works of fiction -- just makes matters ickier. And while I'm glad Ryan caught on to just how hypocritical his position was, I'm not about to compliment him on the quality of his deception, as some on the mailing lists have been doing.

I have no problem with fiction, labeled as such. I even have no problem with extremely subjective viewpoints, even flights of fancy meant to represent a person's feelings or state of mind. Using a pseudonym, switching gender where it doesn't make a substantiative difference, and setting your journal in a different city, for purposes of anonymity, can be okay, done properly. But outright lying represented as the simple truth, just to see how people will react... that bothers me a bit, yes.

I wish I didn't feel as if I had to assert that, though.